A Consultant’s Guide to Personal Problem Solving

Everyone knows consultants love their standard approaches to doing work. The more standard the approach and the more times it’s been tried and proven successful, the better! Any consulting firm worth its salt will tell you that their approaches have been proven to deliver speed-to-value, time-to-value, benefits realization, [insert other consulting-y phrases here], etc. scalability, measurable results, tangible outcomes, transformational change, sustainable results (examples)

In consulting, strong approaches are “table stakes”, aka the most basic requirement for doing our work, primarily because they provide orderly and repeatable mechanisms that help us think through complex problems. The importance of reusing approaches can’t be underestimated – good approaches have been previously used, adjusted from lessons learned, and shown to repeatedly drive successful outcomes. As someone who has been in consulting for 13+ years, I rely on our approaches so that I can organize how to think about problems and mobilize teams around activities and work effort that will deliver outcomes for my clients.

At some point, I had a revelation that I could and should use consulting approaches in my personal life to handle various complex and confusing situations in which I have (not so occasionally) found myself. I’ve written this article to spotlight the two most useful approaches I know of and to explain how they can be used in a personal context. And I promise, you don’t need to be a consultant to use them.

The first approach I’ve found useful in my personal life is a three-phased approach that, in consulting, is typically used for assessment style projects, e.g., a client (typically a company) wants to assess whether or not it should move offices, or acquire another company, or reorganize its leadership team, or implement a new technology – the possibilities of what an organization might want to assess are endless. In whatever the scenario is, the consulting team has (typically) been asked to review a problem and recommend a solution. Consultants will take an approach that is focused on gathering data-driven insights and that typically looks like this:

In short, the consulting team will collect information and data related to the question at hand, analyze that data, and then develop a final report with recommendations on how their client should proceed.

In personal situations, this approach can be used to understand various choices a person may be facing and to determine the best path forward. Making decisions around where to go for your next vacation, whether you should buy a house, which assisted living community is best for your parents, and even far more serious considerations can be dissected using this approach.

How would you actually do this? Let’s dig in and understand more about the how by looking at an example. I’ll take the first question posed above: where should you go for your next vacation? The first thing you’ll want to do is collect information about the places you’re considering; whether there are two places or 20 places on your list, you’ll want to gather key data about these places, such as how much do flights cost, or can I drive or take the train there? What is the hotel and/or Airbnb options? Are there activities at the destinations that interest me? If you have a family, which destinations are kid-friendly? Make a list of the questions you need/want to answer and collect the data to answer them. Once you’ve gathered sufficient information, phase number one is done!

Now the real work begins because you must analyze the information you’ve gathered. This may warrant you to come up with a rating matrix that includes various important dimensions, e.g., price, weather, outdoor activity availability, near the water, etc. These dimensions should be what is important to you. Then you may want to come up with a points system, e.g., flights under $500 get 1 point, flights $500 to $700 get 2 points, and flights more than $700 get 3 points. You could assign similar points values to all dimensions of information you gathered, add up the points, and rate the locations in your matrix based on the points. You could also just list out all the information for each destination and highlight elements that really stick out to you as positive or negative; if you use a pink highlighter for positive and a yellow highlighter for negative, this could yield an interesting visual analysis for you to review. Whatever level of analysis works for you is what you should do.

Once you’ve completed your analysis, it’s time to report out on your findings and make a recommendation. If you’re making the decision of where to go on your own, this is more of a personal thought exercise where you make a recommendation to yourself based on your analysis. However, if you’re going to be traveling with a group of friends, your family, and/or your significant other you can formally report out on your analysis and make your data-based recommendation for where you should go on your trip. I’m not saying you need to make a fancy PowerPoint presentation or anything (though of course you can if you want to), but you have information to share out in whatever format (email, verbally, etc.) best suits the circumstances.

I realize this might seem like a lot of effort to answer a seemingly simple question. I’m certainly not suggesting you have to take this approach to figure out your next travel spot, though you certainly could. The point of going through that was more to demonstrate how this approach can be used to dissect questions we have and understand the various dimensions relevant to our answers – for more complex and potentially higher-impact decisions, taking a structured approach to understanding your options and deciding on the best choice can be incredibly powerful.

As we all know, deciding what to do is only the beginning – the actual acting on the decision is frequently much more effort. For actioning your decision, I will introduce the second standard consulting approach that I referenced earlier in this article. The approach is a five-phased model that, in consulting – and actually in all industries – is known as the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). There are a few different permutations of the SDLC, including ones with 7 phases and ones that are waterfall vs. agile (aka sequential vs. iterative), and the phases sometimes have different names. For the purposes of this article and walking you through an example, I will be referencing a five-phased waterfall (sequential) version of this approach, visualized below:

When consultants use the SDLC, it’s typically to implement technology. They develop what’s known as a project plan, which lays out, in excruciating detail, each and every task that needs to be completed to achieve the technology implementation. Once that’s done, they engage all relevant stakeholders to design the technology – what does it need to do for the business, what should it look like, etc. From there, the technology gets built, tested to make sure it works, and deployed for use within the company. I will say this is a gross simplification of the SDLC – to all my fellow consultants, please forgive me – I am in no way trying to say what we do on tech implementations is simple. But for our purposes of getting into personal-life application, that’s enough information.

So how can you use a five-step software technology implementation process to take action in your personal life?

Let’s continue with the example of the vacation. You’ve decided, based on your previous effort, that you want to go to India for your next trip. That’s a big trip, so you better make a plan – and just like that, you’re in Phase 1. In order to properly plan, you need to first decide when you want to go to India; this is going to be your “deploy” date. We need to start with the end in mind and work our way backwards from there. You pick your travel date, and then, in your planning efforts, you need to think about everything you have to do between now and when you go. You can list out all these tasks, e.g., budget? buy flights, determine cities to visit, book hotels in the cities, make restaurant reservations, get vaccines, check on visa requirements, buy any special clothing you’ll need, pack your suitcase, pack your kids’ suitcases (if applicable), etc., the dates by which you want to have each task completed, and who is responsible for each task (if it’s not just you). This can be done in Excel, in a Word doc, hand-written, whatever works for you. And voila! You have a plan.

Now it’s time to design the trip, i.e., enter Phase 2 of our five-phased approach. Which cities are you going to visit? Which hotels or Airbnbs are you going to stay in? There are countless questions you’ll need to ask and answer, and as you answer them, you’ll be designing your trip. This is the part of the approach where, if you’re traveling with anyone else, you’ll want to get their input – the timing on getting input from others during design is important because nothing is set in stone at this point, and different ideas can still be discussed.

The trip build, i.e., Phase 3, comes in as you begin buying plane tickets, booking hotels, etc. And the test phase, i.e., Phase 4, is about confirming everything is in place, double-checking that your decisions work for other people involved in your trip (if applicable), etc. Since you haven’t yet “deployed” the trip, changes can still be made – you may run into situations, however, where a major change to the original design of the trip could have an impact on multiple components of the vacation, e.g., if you and your traveling companion(s) decided during Design that you wanted to go to New Delhi, but now people are saying they’d rather go to Goa, that’s going to upend the entire Design and Build of the trip. So, you would need to evaluate the feasibility and impact of making that change so late in the game.

The reality of planning a vacation is that you may take a more “agile”, i.e., iterative, approach to the design, build, and test in that you’re making certain design decisions and building and testing those before you make all of your design decisions, and that is totally fine. That could be portrayed in a visual such as this one:

Depending on your preference, style of working, and way of thinking, either will work. Again, for the purposes of this article, I am primarily referencing the original visual, but thinking about things as shown above can work just as well.

In any case, this whole time, you should have been following your plan – looking at what you (and others) needed to accomplish, making sure you were on time, and adjusting tasks if anything fell behind. The reality of planning a vacation (and any work, really) is that having a plan is necessary to stay on track – and if you fall too far behind on the tasks you need to do, you put the end goal, which in our scenario is your vacation, at risk of not being achieved. Thus, monitoring and tracking to the plan is critical.

Hopefully all the tasks have been completed on time, and you’ve sailed through the plan you set back in Phase 1. You’re at the date of your vacation, and it’s time to deploy your vacation, thus realizing the fifth and final phase! Have an awesome trip in India – your work is done. I should caveat that, in some situations, the deploy phase may require additional work. In the vacation scenario, for example, you could want to track your spending on your trip, or assign responsibility for family passports, or whatever other tasks may be part of the deploy effort. In a scenario where, say, you’ve used this approach to plan an event (a wedding, a large surprise party, etc.), Deploy may include writing thank you cards to guests, closing out gratuities with vendors, and more. How you realize the deploy phase depends on your personal preference.

As you can probably see, in personal situations, this five-phased approach is best suited for achieving clearly definable goals that can be measured and time-boxed. The time period can be long – for example, if you were going to use this approach to plan out starting a business, it might span years – but there typically should be an “end point” for this to work. I used light-hearted examples above, but this could certainly be applied to much more serious endeavors – and in fact, these types of scenarios may warrant the use of this type of approach even more than something like planning a vacation.

I would be remiss to say these approaches will solve your problems for you – they won’t. Consultants (me included) are always looking for ways to be more efficient and more effective in our work – I’d go so far as to say we all hope we’ll find some silver bullet to driving successful transformation, or optimizing productivity and cost, or solving whatever problem du jour is presented. The reality is the only silver bullet in consulting is to do the work and do it thoughtfully and thoroughly. Some consultancies might tell you they’ve “cracked the code” for certain problems, and of course, everyone is presently enamored with artificial intelligence (AI) and its promise to make us all faster and better at, well, just about everything. And we certainly can and should avail ourselves of enhancements such as AI to augment and expedite our efforts. The fact remains, however, that nothing, as of yet, replaces careful thinking and work effort in consulting. The same is true in real life – sure, there’s always a one-in-300-million chance you’ll win the lottery, but probably if you want to solve your problems you just need to do the work. Having an approach as a starting point to tackle the situations in front of you is frequently – for consultants and non-consultants alike – the first step towards understanding and working through whatever it is we’re facing in life.